Gerrit Cole’s excellent 2015 has come with three starts in which he didn’t pitch at least six innings. All three have come against the Cincinnati Reds, including the 4 2/3 inning shelling at the hands of the Reds back in June that might be his only legitimately bad start all season. Like much of the […]

This morning, @WalkoffHBPRyan asked me and a few other Pirate bloggers on Twitter why the general response to the Pirates’ deadline day moves was more or less lukewarm: I tend to tackle all acquisitions by the Pirates at this point from the angle that they’re a good front office and that they don’t acquire players […]

All afternoon, all I wanted was the Pirates to finish their deadline moves up even a little bit early because I knew that at 5 PM I was supposed to be out in Durham to meet up with friends to head out to Raleigh for this year’s Beer, Bourbon, and BBQ festival. When the deadline […]

I have plans this evening that directly abut the trade deadline, so I’m writing this post early. I have no idea if the Pirates have traded for anyone, or if the Reds have gotten rid of anyone, or if nothing at all has happened. The posts underneath this one could say anything. Regardless of what […]

Just when you thought that the Pirates had done nothing at the trade deadline, suddenly a mini-avalanche of small moves happens. The first one is one that we probably could’ve anticipated earlier in the trade season: the Pirates swapped DFA’d players with the Dodgers by trading Jose Tabata for Mike Morse.

We’ve got about six hours until this afternoon’s trade deadline, and I think the safest bet might be that the Pirates are done. They’ve already addressed their infield/bench depth situation with Aramis Ramirez, they’ve made one trade that upgrades their bullpen with Joakim Soria, and they’ve made a third move that might do the same […]

The easiest response to a 15-5 loss in which Jaff Decker throws a scoreless inning is probably to laugh. You know the tropes here — a 15-5 loss is the same as a 1-0 loss, and seeing a sub-six-foot outfielder sling 82 mph fastballs towards Major League hitters is never not hilarious. The problem, of […]

The Pirates just announced this afternoon that they’ve acquired Joakim Soria from the Tigers in exchange for minor leaguer JaCoby Jones. A few people started connecting the teams together about an hour ago, but

It’s getting late and I’m still in lab, staring at a post about Joakim Soria (coming up next!) and so I’m going to keep this series preview short. The Pirates have been awful against the Reds this year (2-7). The Reds, in turn, have been awful at baseball this year (45-54, including all those wins […]

The Pirates just tweeted that it will be Vance Worley and not Deolis Guerra that will be designated for assignment to make room for Joe Blanton tonight. Since I spent most of my time assuming the Pirates were going to use Blanton in the Guerra role and that Guerra was the most likely to be […]

With less than 30 hours to go until the trade deadline, the Pirates have been very quiet. They announced that Joe Blanton trade at about 12:30 last night when no one was paying attention, but before that they hadn’t been attached to any specific player or rumor since the rumor that they were “working on […]

The Pirates announced tonight that they acquired Joe Blanton from the Royals for cash. Blanton was designated for assignment earlier this week when the Royals acquired Ben Zobrist. It’s late and I’d rather go to bed than dig through Blanton’s Baseball-Reference page (I was honestly just laying in bed, updating Twitter on my iPad and […]

One of the wonderful things about a player like Andrew McCutchen is that no matter how badly he seems to be slumping, he’s never more than a swing away from breaking out. After an 0-for-5 night last night, a relatively slow start to the second half, and a strikeout in the first inning against the […]

Francisco Liriano’s really only made one terrible start in 2015, and it came in May against the same Twins that he’ll face this afternoon. Actually, it was his two-inning outing that dropped the Pirates to 18-22 that brought Pirate fans to peak tooth-gnashing back in May, exactly one day before the season turned around. Liriano’s […]

I think that most of us expected this news in one form or another, but Pirates Prospects is reporting this morning (subscription link) that Tyler Glasnow, the Pirates’ top prospect and one of the best pitching prospects in baseball, is heading to Indanapolis after dominating for much of this season in Double-A with Altoona. Glasnow’s numbers […]